Category: Harness Cheryl

The Wednesday Night Crush

3/9/2023

Cheryl Harness
She's historical!

Until 1800, the U.S. capital had been Philadelphia, a big city. Then the capital moved to Washington, DC, a small town with dirt roads, lots of trees, and the not-quite-finished Capitol and presidential mansion, known to some as the “White House.” In the winter of 1809, when Abe Lincoln (future President No. 16 – the tallest) was still a baby, James Madison, the new president (No. 4 – the shortest), gave a party. It happened that James’s wife, Dolley, was excellent at bringing all sorts of people together and making sure they had a jolly time. This was her way of making Mr. Madison popular.

    So, one Wednesday evening, the Madisons’ servants (enslaved African Americans, some of them) welcomed party goers to the White House. The large East Room, where Abigail Adams (wife of President No. 2) hung up her laundry, was closed off. Now the politicians, government workers, foreign diplomats, and their wives exchanged smiles with rosy Dolley Madison. (She used blusher – very daring then!) Imagine people in the oval-shaped Blue Room (cream-colored then, with red velvet curtains), laughing with the First Lady, all fancy in her Paris gown.

    Next door was the sunny gold parlor (the Red Room now), where you might visit with shy, brainy President Madison. (Did you know he helped to write the U.S. Constitution? Well he did!) Best of all was the big State Dining Room. It had been an office for Thomas Jefferson (President No. 3). Now it was full of FOOD: Savory snacks, tea and other drinks, little cakes and a rare delicacy: ice cream. Imagine guests with their mouths full and eyes wide, staring up at Gilbert Stuart’s great portrait of President No. 1. Some of the guests had met George Washington, but they all knew how much he’d done to make the United States possible.

    Everyone had such a good time, that there was another party the next Wednesday and the next. LOTS of people came – even the most disagreeable politicians! The popular weekly party, with its crowds of mashed together party goers, was a White House tradition for a while. It even got a name: Mrs. Madison’s Crush.

Gilbert Stuart portrait of President George Washington

Dolley Madison

Cheryl Harness's latest book is Flags Over America, a picture book history of flags, especially America's. It was published for the 200 YEARS anniversary since Francis Scott Key wrote his poem about the Star Spangled Banner. For more information, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "The Wednesday Night Crush." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 28 Nov. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-Wednesday-Night-Crush.

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Kidnapped!

3/3/2023

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Cheryl Harness
She’s historical!

This story happened in 1778, a time of terrible war. As General George Washington’s troops shivered in their winter camp in Pennsylvania, at Valley Forge, Daniel Boone was hunting out west, in the future state of Kentucky. Nearby, in the forest, his friends were boiling down mineral-rich spring water to make salt for their families in Boonesborough. It was a community of cabins in and around a log stockade, to protect the pioneers from attackers.

Of whom were they afraid? The First Nations, who’d been living in the so-called New World for countless generations. Specifically, Daniel Boone’s people feared the Shawnee and Cherokee peoples—and vice versa. The Native Americans were fighting an endless supply of white settlers determined to take their ancestral lands. All through and after the Revolutionary War years, American, British, and Native warriors fought throughout the wilderness west of the Appalachian Mountains and east of the Mississippi River.

We know Daniel Boone as a frontier explorer and trailblazer. To the Natives, he was “Wide Mouth,” a leader of the invasion that threatened to end their ways of life forever. So it was a BIG deal when, on a winter day in 1778, Shawnee Chief Blackfish and his warriors captured him! Daniel used all of his wits to work out a trade: In return for making him and his salt-making friends their prisoners, the Shawnee would put off attacking Boonesborough.

For ten days, the captives were marched through the snowy woods to Chillicothe, the big Shawnee town in Ohio. The British paid bounties for colonial prisoners, so some of Daniel’s friends were sold. They and others were lost to history, but we know that Daniel had to prove his courage in the gauntlet, dashing between rows of Shawnee warriors, getting hit by clubs.

Now, he’d known Natives and studied their ways since he was a boy. To stay safe until he could get back to his family, he knew he needed to let Chief Blackfish do as he wished: adopt him into his tribe. Daniel got scrubbed. He got all of his hair plucked out except for a “scalp lock” atop his head. He got a new name too: Sheltowee or “Big Turtle.” But it was June before he got the chance to escape. Then Daniel ran, hid, hiked, and limped 160 miles home to Boonesborough, in time to prepare for the attack of the angry Shawnee.

But that’s another story for another day.

The adventurous life of Daniel Boone began in Pennsylvania, November 2, 1734. It ended away out west in Missouri, September 26, 1820.

Fort Boonesborough

George Caleb Bingham painted this image of Daniel Boone leading pioneers into the frontier

Once again, Cheryl Harness combines lively storytelling with vividly detailed illustrations to transport readers back to an exciting era in American history. During Daniel Boone's 86-year life, Colonial America is transformed into a revolutionary republic, trails morph into roads and highways, and Americans discover new ways to travel—by canal, and by steam-powered boats and trains. Readers journey through these formative milestones in America's great westward expansion with the aid of a time line running along each page, 200-plus illustrations, maps, sidebars, primary-source quotations, and resource lists. For information on The Trailblazing Life of Daniel Boone: How Early Americans Took to the Road, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "Kidnapped!" Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 4 June 2018,
www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/kidnapped.

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Tecumseh, the "Shooting Star"

1/27/2023

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Cheryl Harness
She’s historical!

On a night in 1768, a meteor streaked across the skies over a Shawnee village in western Ohio so Chief Puckshinwau named his new little son Tecumseh or “Shooting Star.” He hoped his boy would grow up as he had, farming and hunting along with the other Native tribes in the wild Ohio River Valley. But how troubling it was, those white people from the east, who kept arriving, always wanting more of the beautiful land! Tecumseh was six when one of them killed his father in 1774, the year before the Revolutionary War began.

Throughout the war, British, American, and Native warriors attacked one another in the vast frontier that lay west of the white folks’ towns. At age 12, Tecumseh saw white soldiers burn his village and his people’s crops. After the Americans won their independence, in 1783, they were even more determined to win the West and settle there. To Tecumseh, the Native peoples were up against an all-out invasion! As a young chief, he led fierce raids on white settlements, earning a reputation as a brilliant commander. As a charismatic leader, he traveled up to Canada and down to the Gulf of Mexico, urging the tribes to UNITE, fight, and sign no treaties at the cost of losing their land.

“Let us form one body, one heart,” Tecumseh cried, “and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers.”

As Tecumseh’s message spread among the tribes, along with word of his younger brother’s strong spiritual visions, a religious, political movement surged through Native America. Warriors gathered at the brothers’ settlement by Indiana’s Tippecanoe River. And then, when Tecumseh was away, in November 1811, U.S. soldiers surrounded it. They defeated the Indians in the fateful “Battle of Tippecanoe.”

Tecumseh did not give up. He and warriors from 32 tribes fought on. The British weren’t grabbing tribal lands so the Natives sided with them against the United States in the War of 1812. Valiant Tecumseh led armies and flotillas of canoes against U.S. forces up until an enemy bullet ended his life on October 5, 1813. It marked the end of Tecumseh’s alliance, but the legendary Shooting Star still burns brightly in the skies of memory.

An artist’s notion of Tecumseh. No one knows what he really looked like – or where his body Wikimedia Commons

Tecumseh's younger brother Tenskwatawa became a religious leader. Known as "The Shawnee Prophet", he advocated a return of the Shawnee and other American Indians to their ancestral lifestyle and rejection of the colonists and Americans."Ten-sqúat-a-way" by George Catlin - Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons -

Battle of the Thames and the death of Tecumseh, by the Kentucky mounted volunteers led by Colonel Richard M. Johnson, 5th Oct. 1813. Lithograph, hand coloured. Library of Congress

"Death of Tecumseh," frieze in the United States Capitol rotunda.

Daniel Boone's story is every young adventurer's fantasy: A childhood in Pennsylvania spent hunting on lands shared with Native Americans; a coming-of-age fighting in the French and Indian War; and the fulfillment of a life's dream with the blazing of the Wilderness Road across the Appalachian Mountains and the settling of Boonesborough in Kentucky. Add to this the rescue of his daughter from Shawnee warriors, and readers are quickly in the thick of another irresistible Cheryl Harness History. For more information on The Trailblazing Life of Daniel Boone, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "Tecumseh, the 'Shooting Star.'" Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think
Tank, 7 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
Tecumseh-the-Shooting-Star.

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Dear Friend

1/26/2023

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Cheryl Harness
She’s historical

Picture this: It’s cold gray October 1918 in France, in the Argonne Forest. World War I has been going on for four hideous, deadly years. You and about 500 of your fellow Americans are smack in the middle of a MASSIVE battle. You’re running out of food and ammo. Shells are EXPLODING all around you and some of them are American! Those guys don’t know where you and your buddies are, trapped in a hillside valley, surrounded by enemy Germans!

          How can Major Charles Whittlesey, the commander of this lost battalion, let those other Americans know where his unit is? They’re cut off from the telegraph wires; so what, wave a flag? That’ll just draw more enemy fire! The messengers he’d sent had been shot or captured. How about homing pigeons? In this awful war, more than a 100,000 of them were used to carry battlefield messages. The major had sent all but one of his pigeons only to see them shot out of the sky. Finally, the desperate officer calls for his last one, named Cher Ami, the French words for Dear Friend.

          Major Whittlesey scribbles out a message: “We are along the road parallel to 276.4.Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake, stop it.” He rolls the scrap of paper, stuffs it into the tiny silver canister attached to Cher Ami’s leg, and sends him up and away. This pigeon has flown 11 successful missions— will he make it now? He must!

          The Germans fire.

          Cher Ami falls! He’s hit!

          But he beats and flaps his wings, gains altitude, and flies 25 miles. Despite being blinded in one eye and shot in his bloodied breast, Cher Ami delivers the critical message, still attached to his leg, dangling by a bloody tendon. And 194 American soldiers are saved by their brave dear, feathered friend. For his heroic service, Cher Ami was awarded France’s highest medal, le Croix de Guerre (the Cross of War).

          In the months after the war ended, on November 11, 1918, ocean liners carried Cher Ami and many thousands of other veterans to America. He continued to be treated, but in the end, his injuries were too serious. Cher Ami died on June 13, 1919.

          Back in the USA, Major Charles Whittlesey gave speeches about the war. He said nothing about any sorrow or awful memories, so no one knows just why he jumped off a ship to his death in the sea, late one night in November 1921. But the memory of soldiers’ heroism and of one bird’s stubborn courage will never die.

Cher Ami, stuffed and on display, minus his teeny wooden leg, carved by a fellow veteran. Wikimedia

Major Charles White Whittlesey was considered one of the greatest American heroes of the First World War. A Harvard-educated attorney working on Wall Street, he took a leave from his company and enlisted in the army as soon as the war began.

Cher Ami saved what the press called the “Lost Battalion,” a unit of about 200 men. This US Army Signal Corps photo shows them just after reaching friendly territory.

Cheryl's Latest book is Flags Over America. Click here to find out more about the book or click here to find out more about the author.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "Dear Friend." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 8 01 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/dear-friend.

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The Big Deal in Mr. Peale's Museum

1/13/2023

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Cheryl Harness
She’s historical!

While helping to win his country’s independence from Great Britain, Captain C. W. Peale painted General George Washington’s portrait. Cleveland Museum of Art via Wikimedia

It was December 24, 1801, when bundled-up Philadelphians bought their 25¢ tickets and entered Peale’s Museum on Fifth Street. Once inside, they saw the owner’s paintings. And I’ll bet you have too—even if you’ve never heard of Charles Willson Peale. This one, for instance, of his fellow Revolutionary War soldier:

Visitors to the museum had seen Peale’s collections of butterflies, too, and other nature specimens, such as the fossilized teeth of mysterious beasts. (Who knew then that animals went extinct? Hardly anybody!) But on this extra-special Christmas Eve, people probably hurried past Peale’s handmade dioramas, with the lifelike bodies of birds and mammals that he’d stuffed and posed. Today, Mr. C.W. Peale himself was introducing his NEW ATTRACTION. People had paid an extra 50¢ just to see it! Now they looked up, up, UP at it, and were astonished.

What animal’s skeleton was eleven feet tall? Seventeen and a half feet from its bony tail to the tips of its giant, curving tusks? It was a mastodon.

It was not clear, in 1801, that mastodons weren’t the same as wooly mammoths. Wikimedia

No one had seen a live mastodon in more than ten thousand years. So how did one’s bones get to Philadelphia? Mr. Peale and other naturalists such as Thomas Jefferson, the new President-elect, wrote to one another about their studies, collections, and the latest discoveries, such as like these huge, mysterious bones in southern New York state. Some of North America’s long-gone mastodons ended up there, by the Hudson River. As soon as he heard about them, Peale hurried to see them. Then he not only figured a way to dig up the bones, but he also painted a picture of the huge excavation!

In Peale’s painting “Exhumation of the Mastodon,” he shows some of his children (He had seventeen!) and how he had to pump water out of the beast’s muddy grave. Wikimedia

Peale’s son, Rembrandt helped to draw and assemble the bones:

Rembrandt Peale drew the mastodon skeleton that he’d helped his dad to assemble. C.W. taught his many children – seventeen in all, many named after artists and scientists he admired – to draw, study, and help with his nature exhibits. Wikimedia

For years, people paid to marvel at the enormous, sensational skeleton. Later on, after Mr. Peale’s death in 1827, his museum slowly went broke. P.T. Barnum, the circus showman, bought a lot of his exhibits. Later still, they were destroyed in a fire. And the mighty bones of the mastodon wound up lost for a hundred years, until the skeleton turned up in Germany, where you can see it today.

Mr. Peale painted himself in his marvelous museum, where people could marvel at and learn from the works of Nature. Wikimedia

Hessisches Landesmuseum (Hessian State Museum), Darmstadt, Germany, where Peale's mastodon still stands today.

In Thomas Jefferson, her sixth presidential biography for National Geographic, Cheryl Harness illuminates the many sides of Thomas Jefferson: scientist, lawyer, farmer, architect, diplomat, inventor, musician, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, and third president of the United States. Readers meet this extraordinary man of contradictions: a genius who proclaimed that "All men are created equal" and championed the rights of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," while at the same time living a life that depended on the enforced labor of slaves.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "The Big Deal in Mr. Peale's Museum." Nonfiction Minute, iNK
Think Tank, 18 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
The-Big-Deal-in Mr-Peales-Museum.

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The Wednesday Night Crush

Kidnapped!

Tecumseh, the "Shooting Star"

Dear Friend

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